Friday, March 26, 2010

Where I am in life right now

I really at a place in my life right now where God is teaching me about the pruning process that he talks about in John 15. Interesting, we often think of the pruning process as this mean thing that God does in our lives because we have this horrible hidden sin our life. It is like we think God is out to get us because we are bad and not confessing sin. So he punishes us with difficulty and pain until we get back on the path that he wants. Right? I have been there. Granted sometimes he does have to prune us to show us areas of our lives that we have sinned, but other times he just wants us to grow.

In fact. Read John 15. I point out verse two, "while every branch that does bear fruit he prunesso that it will be even more fruitful." The issue is not that the branch is not producing fruit, rather the issue is the desire of the Father, who is the gardener, for the branch to produce even more fruit. That should be our hearts desire even more than anything. Simply put, produce more fruit. I pray that in my life I see the pruning process as God saying to me, "hey David, I see you are producing fruit, I just desire for you to produce more fruit and this is what I have to do in your life to make that happen." Hebrews 11:12, " No discipline seems please at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it."

That is where I am right now in life. I want my life to count for more. I don't want my life to be simply remembered by what I did not do. Rather, I want my life to be remembered by what I did do in kingdom work. I want my life to count in kingdom work and that is done by producing fruit. Pruning is simply a means to and end, it is not the end.